


Blinded by Panic

by perplexed_kale



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders Angst, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders Has Panic Attacks, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders Needs a Hug, Blind Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Blind Character, Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders is a Good Friend, Fluff and Angst, Former Dark Side Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Gen, Hurt, Hurt Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Hurt/Comfort, Logic | Logan Sanders Is A Good Friend, Morality | Patton Sanders is a Good Friend, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Alternating, Panic Attacks, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-28 15:28:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30141645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perplexed_kale/pseuds/perplexed_kale
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Everyone, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Logic | Logan Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Morality | Patton Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Thomas Sanders
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

The first time the darkness fell, he was alone. Alone in a room he did not know.

He had sluggishly opened his eyes, waking up from a peaceful slumber, expecting to see the mess which typically adorned his bedroom. What was he greeted with instead? A darkened room devoid of his things. He understood this place was not his bedroom, so what was it? And, more importantly, where in the name of Gerard Way was it?  
His spine cracked as he sat up, propping himself up onto his elbow. A slight turn to the left revealed just what he wanted to see: a bedside table. A table meant a possible clue, and Virgil was itching to find a clue.

He leaned over, reaching to touch his palm to the smooth wood. He dragged his hand across the table, knocking against what felt like his phone. A quick glance over the table revealed that it was exactly that. He might as well pick that up, right?  
He pulled the covers off of himself, letting them drop next to him. Virgil looked at them for a moment, watching the blanket fold in on itself and form a pile. He kind of wished he could do the same.  
Reaching back to the table, he grabbed his phone, slipping the device into the pocket of his gym shorts.  
Even as he ran his hand across the rest of the surface, the table didn’t yield too much. Guess it was time to explore the rest of the room.  
The cot beneath him creaked as he moved into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. He planted his hands on either side of his hips, pushing himself off of the mattress. Once he was up, bare feet firmly on the plush carpeting, he took a few hesitant steps forward.  
Once certain there was nothing to fear in the room itself, he looked around and took in the environment.

The room was practically empty, save for the cot and table behind him, and a desk and swivel chair placed halfway across the room. Looking around, he saw nothing else. With that, what was there to do but look at the desk? Virgil supposed he could just lay back down and go back to bed, but he felt like that would not really work. So, he strode forward and approached the desk.  
He ran his hands over the cold surface, laying his palm flat on the wood before beginning to rummage through the drawers. The things he found were tossed onto the desk as he scoured for some sort of a clue.  
A box of pens? Unimportant  
A blank calendar? Told him nothing.  
An empty picture frame? He couldn’t even understand why it was in the desk, nonetheless explain what it meant.

Even after pulling what felt like a whole office worth of supplies out of the drawers, the desk yielded no information. A sigh fell from his lips as he pushed the now-light drawers shut, albeit a bit violently. It shuddered and creaked, a notebook he had pulled out of the drawers falling to the ground.  
But that wasn’t important, he would pick it up later.  
What was important was figuring out where the hell he was.  
If the room wouldn’t tell him where he was, he’d go figure it out himself.

Virgil approached the door, gently turning the handle. He sucked in a breath through his nose, then pushed the exit open just a bit. If someone was in the hallway, he did not want them knowing he was awake.  
Even as the door let out a short squeak, no such person made their presence known. Anxiety gathered his confidence, taking a few deep breaths. He pushed the door open just a little more, peering into the hallway on the other side.  
The outside was just as dark as the room around him, a shadow of a doorway across the hall. However, what he saw meant less than what he heard. What he heard was voices, faint enough that Virgil couldn’t make out what they were saying, but just loud enough that he could identify who they belonged to.  
Roman, Patton, and Logan.  
He was on the Light Side of the Mindscape, and that terrified him.  
The Light Sides hated his guts, so there was not a snowball’s chance in hell that they would accept him as one of them. They’d more likely kill him.  
It had to be a mistake. It had to be.  
But the Mindscape hadn’t ever made a mistake. It couldn’t make mistakes.  
Actually, the Mindscape made him, so maybe it did make mistakes.  
But that still didn’t explain why he was here.  
Why was he here?  
He shouldn’t be here!  
…  
Each spiraling thought wrapped its way around him.  
…  
They were choking him.  
…  
They were choking him!  
…  
He stumbled across the room, each step becoming harder to take than the last. With each one, his heart rate increased, his gasps took in less and less air, and he was getting dizzier and dizzier. He stumbled across the room, intent on reaching the cot, but his foot caught on the notebook he had dropped earlier. He fell to the ground, curling into himself as he landed on the floor.  
His vision began to fade away.

Virgil’s first day in the Light Side was ruined as he laid there, blinded by panic in more ways than one.

It had taken a few attacks for Virgil to realize what was happening.  
For a while, he wondered if he had just been experiencing tunnel vision, a common symptom of his brand of panic, but tunnel vision never obscured his whole line of sight. Typically, it would not even creep farther than his peripheral.  
He had ruled out tunnel vision, so what could it be? What was different between every other panic attack he had ever had and his past three?  
The only difference he could think of was his location. His room had suddenly shifted from the Dark Side to the Light, and that very well could be having secondary effects.  
But that begged the question: Why was the Light Side any different from the Dark?  
Did the Mindscape just want to punish him? Because if so, it was doing a damn good job of it. First, it chucked him on the Light Side, something the other sides were most definitely not going to appreciate. Then it decided to make him suffer for doing what he was made to do: panic. He was Anxiety, for fuck’s sake!  
It was a fucked-up way to make sure he stayed in line. One you’d only expect from some sort of sadist. But, Virgil had to admit it was a pretty damn efficient way to keep him under control.  
…  
Plus, he probably deserved it.

The next time the darkness fell, he wasn’t alone.  
Needless to say, it was hell.

Thomas had summoned the sides for a discussion, and, surprisingly, Virgil didn’t have to suddenly pop up and scare Thomas. Instead, Thomas willingly brought him up alongside the other three sides.  
It was a goddamn miracle.  
Okay, it may have just been because it was a discussion of a social situation. A social situation he would probably shut down if he wasn’t alerted beforehand. You know, being Anxiety and all.  
It felt good to be included, alright?  
That was, until he had to ruin it all.

He had just sent a bit too much anxiety towards Thomas. Which caused the host to hyperventilate. Which may or may not have been the start of a panic attack.  
He was just doing his job! He had to keep Thomas safe!  
…He had to.  
But now, Virgil’s vision got dimmer and dimmer with every breath.  
Dimmer.  
Darker.  
Gone.  
He was blind, unable to react to his surroundings and the actions of the others. So he did all he could think to do.  
Flee.  
He didn’t trust his other senses to keep him safe around others. He didn’t even trust the others.  
All he could do was run away and hope the other sides could calm Thomas down.  
He lay on the floor of his bedroom, riding out his panic attack alone and blinded by panic.  
Again.

This became routine.  
Over time, Virgil slowly adjusted to being stripped of one of his senses.  
He couldn’t say it was nice, or that he enjoyed being blinded, but he was adjusting.  
That was all that mattered.  
He knew when it happened, he knew how to get through it, he knew what he needed to know.  
It was just his burden to take.

The next time it happened around the others, he couldn’t just be a coward and run away to his room.  
Why?  
Well, they were already in his room.  
And his room was the reason everything had gone wrong.

Soon after the other sides arrived, Virgil had noticed something was off with them all. They were a bit more erratic, stressed. There was a little less logical thinking, a little more sudden emotions.  
Huh, that sounds like the title of a Fall Out Boy song. Kinda funny.  
Back to what he was saying.  
Their behavior was odd to him, but he pushed it off. Virgil just made sure to keep up his side of the discussion. He even tried to speed it up a bit more, for the other’s sake.  
His concern spiked, however, when the eyeshadow made itself visible on their faces.  
Virgil now knew his room was affecting the others, and he knew that, if they didn’t get the hell out of there soon, they were doomed.  
Once Thomas started to feel the effect Virgil’s room was having on the others, he would start to panic. Then, they’d be stuck with a slightly panicking, blind Virgil attempting to get all three of the other sides and their host out of his room.  
That was something he could not do unless Thomas was conscious and calm.  
The moment Thomas felt the effects was their event horizon, and Virgil had to do everything in his power to keep them away from that.  
He did his best to speed up the discussion, feeling the stress in the room rise which each word uttered. He spoke faster, cut the others off to get them to speak less, anything he could do to speed things up.  
But the makeup darkened and so did Virgil’s vision.  
He had to get these guys out of here.

And once he found his opening, he snatched it the hell up.  
He turned to where he hoped Thomas stood (he very well could have been staring at the wall, or even Patton, but that is beside the point) and addressed the man directly. Virgil began to lead him through a breathing exercise, one he often used during his own attacks.  
With each breath, his vision returned and the air of panic that filled the room slowly blew away. Then, with one final breath, Virgil felt himself getting summoned to Thomas’s living room.  
So he went.  
Once they were all back, safe, and (for Virgil) could see, they wrapped up their discussion.  
And as they did so, Virgil made a gut decision.  
He told the others his name. He wasn’t just Anxiety anymore, he was Virgil. He was a valued part of their group.  
Maybe he wouldn’t have to be alone anymore.  
Maybe the punishment would stop.

The punishment didn’t stop.  
It got worse.

It was soon after his acceptance that parts of his vision began to fade.  
It started small, little sections blurring away just a bit. So little, he could excuse it easily as tiredness or a bit of over-hanging anxiety. He thought it would pass like it always did.  
Boy, was he wrong.  
It did not pass, it got worse. The blurring moved in from his peripheral, glazing over his eyes and warping his vision.

That was when he started to get good at faking sight.  
His first order of business was to count. He counted his strides as he walked across rooms, counted the steps it took to get between pieces of furniture, counted how long it took to heat certain things on the stove (that one was a bit riskier, and his hands have the blisters to show it), and counted some more. He had the whole Mindscape down to a map of numbers and steps.  
Next was learning how to identify and locate the others without seeing them. Identifying them by voice was easy (hell, he could do it before he even started to lose his sight), but identifying them by other means? That took a bit longer to perfect. By the time all he could see was blurred shapes and colors, he could identify the other sides by details ranging from the weight of their footsteps to the fabric of their clothes. Locating and looking at the others was a fickle thing. He either nailed it and had almost direct eye contact with the source of a voice, or he looked at the wrong person, a wall, or anything else but the speaker. Practice made it easier, but he never really mastered eye-contact. Shit was difficult even before he couldn’t see.  
The last big thing he taught himself was reading others, which was probably the most difficult task. So much of reading other’s emotions is centered on reading their expression, and without that one needs to learn all the subtle (or not so subtle) vocal queues that let you read someone like a book. Roman and Patton were relatively easy to read, as they showed such larger than life emotions so much of the time, but reading Logan was an art he had to spend weeks perfecting. Hell, he hadn’t perfected it even months later.

He thought he could handle it. He knew what to do, and he could do it well.  
But then it had to get worse.  
Blurred shapes and dull colors became black, spilling over his line of sight like a split drink spreads over the floor. A few more attacks, darkness creeping ever closer to the center, and it was dark. He couldn’t see.  
And in a way that felt like adding insult to injury, his punishment went away. It was done with him.  
He didn’t stay in line, and he had suffered for it.


	2. Chapter 2

When Anxiety first arrived in the “light side” of the Mindscape, Logan had been the one to find him.

The logical side assumed he was the only one awake, per it being past midnight, but he was still careful to not risk waking the other two as he headed slowly from his bedroom upstairs to the kitchen. Yes, he feared the consequences he would face if Patton discovered he was up so late, but he did not fear the other side enough to stay in his bed and attempt to get some rest.  
Sleep could wait, his work and the coffee he was going to grab could not. It was simple as that, truly.  
He might even be able to grab a bit of a snack to go with his hot drink. A bit of hunger had crept up on him as he worked, so… toast, maybe? It would be simple and easy to make, as to not disturb the other sides with his noise. Plus, he could put Crofters on it.  
…  
Yes, toast would do for a snack.

The logical side was still deep in his thoughts as he reached the bottom of the stairs, debating what flavor of jam would be best for his late-night snack as he glanced up from his feet. He took one more step forward as he took in his surroundings, stopping as he spotted and registered the bright light still shining through the small window between the kitchen and dining room.  
What was the term for such a set-up? Logan remembered researching the name at Thomas’s request and, if his memory served him right, he believed the technical term for it was a serving hatch, especially when used in a restaurant-  
Logan stopped himself. Such a train of thought was irrelevant.  
What was relevant was the fact that the light in the kitchen was on.  
Perhaps one of the other two were awake?  
…No, that wouldn’t make sense. Logan had seen both Patton and Roman retire to their bedrooms before he entered his own, and he had not heard either exit their rooms since. It was unlikely he would have missed such a thing, as his fellow sides did have a tendency to be unaware of their volume when walking the halls at night. To put it bluntly, they were loud when they were tired.  
Logan recalled one instance when he was startled out of his sleep by Roman shouting at and threatening a shadow he thought, in his sleep-deprived state, was a foe.  
He did not remember said incident fondly.  
So, no, it was likely that, at the very least, Roman was still asleep.  
Perhaps Patton had left it on after cleaning up from dinner?  
That would be odd, as the moral side was typically quite careful to make sure the lights were off before bedtime, but everyone slips up occasionally.  
At the very least, it was far more likely than the first option.  
…  
That must be it, Logan decided as he continued on his foray to the kitchen. Nothing to think about for more than a moment.  
Jam flavor, on the other hand, was a much better topic to debate as he walked. Should he go for strawberry or blueberry, or even branch out from his usuals and go for such a flavor as grape?

In hindsight, he shouldn’t have expected such a simple answer to his questions. Such things were never simple in the Mindscape.

Logan, still half-caught in his thoughts about jam, quickly crossed the living room, turned the corner in the hallway, and strode over the threshold to the kitchen.  
The gentle thud of a cabinet echoing through the silence was what pulled him back to reality, the logical side only a step farther into the room.  
He looked up and there, holding two granola bars and a bottle of water in a rumpled sweatshirt and some gym shorts, was Anxiety.  
Needless to say, Logan was a bit startled.  
Anxiety was stood in front of a cabinet and facing the opposite way as Logan froze, a moment passing before the other side finally turned to face him.  
He stiffened as he spotted Logan, gaze slowly tracing up Logan’s figure for a moment before the two sides inevitably met eyes. Under Logan’s questioning gaze, Anxiety flinched, dropping the little food he carried onto the floor with a thud. At the noise, he visibly recoiled, rushing to kneel down and pick up the food. In his haste, he fumbled with one of the granola bars, cursing quietly under his breath as it hit against the tile floor again.  
“Fuck, fuck. Couldn’t be quiet, could you? Now they’re gonna hate you for creeping around…”  
Anxiety muttered under his breath, fumbling for a moment more before swiftly dropped the food on the counter. He took a deep, shuddering breath, looking back towards Logan and raising his now-shaking hands in surrender.  
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’ll leave now.”  
Anxiety continued to apologize, words slurring together as his mind moved faster than his lips could. Logan could see the other side startle as he raised his hands in a similar gesture of surrender, raising an eyebrow at Anxiety as he froze like a dear in headlights. For a moment, the room was silent and nearly still, the rise and fall of Anxiety’s chest and the shake of his hands the only movement either side dared to make.  
After a beat, Logan strode forward, stepping out of the doorway to approach the other side.  
“It’s alright, Anxiety.”  
His eyes were wild with panic as Logic took another couple of steps closer. Anxiety seemed to rapidly evaluate the situation, eyes darting between Logan’s face, his raised hands, and the surroundings. It was not unlike Logic’s own methods of evaluation when he entered a situation he was unfamiliar with, just with a bit more panic infused into the actions.  
Perhaps Anxiety and he were not as different as he originally thought.  
Logan let the other side evaluate, before breaking the silence.  
“It’s alright,” Logan sent what he hoped was a reassuring smile and slight nod to the other side, “though I am curious as to why-”  
Logan was cut off as Anxiety darted around him, shoving his shoulder slightly and turning the corner hastily. He halted, caught off guard by the sudden movement.  
Ah, yes, Anxiety is both fight and flight, isn’t it? So it would make sense that the side who embodied it was able to move quickly when he wished to.  
Logan focused back into the situation in time to hear a soft thud and a series of curses muttered through quick, shallow breaths as Anxiety seemed to run into the wall of the hallway. The movement paused for a moment, before swiftly resuming. Another two sounds of collision and a series of quick footsteps followed as Anxiety raced through the living room.  
Logan looked out of the kitchen’s doorway just in time to catch a glimpse of Anxiety, slightly obscured by shadow, running into the banister before resuming his hurried pace up the stairs.  
…  
Huh.  
Logic thought for a moment, simply excusing the stumbling as a side effect of the other side’s haste and turning back to the kitchen.  
He might as well still make his coffee, right?

If only he knew the real reason.  
Maybe then Anxiety and he could have figured the problem before it escalated out of control.  
If only.

Anxiety emerged from his room for the second time about a week later, Thomas summoning the light sides for a discussion and Anxiety allowing himself to pulled out of the Mindscape.  
His intentions for showing up weren’t even malicious, to the surprise of the other sides. Logan, he would admit, was surprised to even see Anxiety, nonetheless see him in a state that wasn’t anger or panic.  
No, instead, Thomas had willingly brought Anxiety into the discussion and Anxiety had willingly joined and engaged in it.  
It might have been due to the topic being a social outing Thomas was debating on going to, a decision that, despite any agreement the other sides came to in any number of discussions, Anxiety could overturn in a matter of seconds if not alerted to beforehand. Those points may have been true, and likely were, but it surprised Logan nonetheless.  
Perhaps they were getting through to Anxiety?  
…  
Either way, the discussion was going oddly well.  
Too well, Logan thought.  
So, of course, Logan couldn’t help but notice that the man to his right seemed to be getting a bit antsy after a while. Anxiety shuffled around as he listened, bouncing on the balls of his heels while he fidgeted with the strings on his hoodie and chewed his thumbnail. Such behaviors were typical of the anxious side, but the degree to which he engaged in them was atypically severe. After a moment more, Logan assured himself that Thomas would be fine if he diverted his attention for a couple of seconds and turned a bit farther to his side to inspect Anxiety’s features.  
The anxious side was tense, back ramrod straight and shoulders pulled up tightly. His expression showed nothing, but the other aspects of his body language betrayed him. Even with his little knowledge of emotions, Logan could tell that he was working hard to mask the emotions, most likely anxiety, that he was feeling. But his eyes were scared and, if Logan was reading it right, a bit sad.  
Anxiety, seeming to sense the gaze inspecting him from top to bottom, turned slightly to the left to meet Logan’s eyes. He raised an eyebrow in questioning, lips curling in a weak sneer, one Logan could tell was forced.  
That was curious, he must admit.  
If today was any indicator, Anxiety was not malicious for the sake of being mean, but instead lashed out and pushed others away as a defense mechanism.  
But why would he do that? Logan could only wonder.  
He could barely do that, seemingly, as his metaphorical train of thought was brought to a screeching halt by a boisterous yell from Roman’s corner of the living room. Logan quickly turned back to face his host and reengage in the discussion, but couldn’t help his thoughts from wandering back to the anxious side.  
As the sides continued to argue, Logan could only glance over and meet the gaze to the side at his right, nodding in reassurance as Anxiety seemed to silently ask if he was doing alright.

It meant so much more to Anxiety than Logan could ever understand.

The argument was escalating. The emotions in the room were on the rise and Logan was powerless to stop them.  
He could only watch from a distance as Anxiety seemed to spiral further into his panic.  
Logan wished it would be polite for him to tell the other three in the room to shut the hell up, but, alas, it would not be. He had an image to maintain, didn’t he?  
Not even a minute later, he regretted his hesitance. All at once, Roman shouted in anger, Thomas began to hyperventilate, and he could almost feel the side next to him wince.  
Groaning internally, Logan quickly evaluated the situation. Thomas seemed to be ebbing ever-closer to the point of no return and, logically, he knew that Anxiety would be heading down a similar route if the sides didn’t diffuse the panic-and-anger-riddled environment.  
But how to diffuse the situation? Logic would have to figure it out as he went.  
At first, he moved to help Thomas, stopping as he saw the two sides on the opposite side of the room do the same.  
Perhaps if the other two were handling Thomas, he could provide a comforting presence to Anxiety.  
He may be a bit cruel at times, but it would be callous of Logan to ignore his panic, especially with the logical side’s recent realization about the circumstances around such spite.  
He hesitated for a moment, fearing how Anxiety would react in such a moment of fight-or-flight, before glancing over his shoulder. But as he turned to his right, he was just able to spot Anxiety sinking out, one hand covering his eyes loosely and the other holding a shaking fistful of his loose shirt. Eyes widening, Logan reached out, a moment too late to stop Anxiety from retreating back to the safety of his room.  
Even as he turned back to and soothed his host’s worries with facts, Logan’s mind continued to wander back to the side clad in black.  
He hoped Anxiety was doing alright.

Anxiety very much was not doing alright.

A couple of weeks passed without incident… until everything happened all at once.  
Of course, because things are never just simple in the Mindscape.

It was only a few minutes after Logan was summoned by Thomas that the side had noticed something was off with his host.  
The man was a bit more relaxed, a lot more casual than he typically was. He didn’t seem to have any direction for where the video was supposed to go, a stark contrast to how he typically had a point to prompt the inevitable argument that would occur between the sides.  
Logan could not for the life of him figure out what was wrong until Patton offered a suggestion.  
A lack of anxiety.  
It made a lot of sense, now that Logan thinks about it. He severely doubted how well Patton was at reading the emotions of their host until that day, he must admit.  
This lack of anxiety was quickly explained by a lack of, well… Anxiety. At least, Anxiety’s presence. The side could not be summoned and appeared to have no real hold on Thomas, a stark contrast to the sometimes harsh grip he kept on the host.  
This was odd, Logan had to admit. Why would Anxiety choose to release his hold on Thomas so suddenly?  
Logan didn’t mind that the side was attempting to be a little less overbearing, but he would have expected Anxiety to pull back a lot slower, across a couple of days or even weeks. With that, he could evaluate the situation with each day that passed and figure out how far he could go before the effects were negative on Thomas; a series of careful, calculated steps.  
Going in with metaphorical guns blazing and making a brash, impulsive decision with no thought of consequences wasn’t typically what Anxiety was about. Hell, Anxiety almost always thought about the consequences too much.  
Never not enough.  
Pulling himself away from that train of thought, Logan had to admit that he was originally relieved that Anxiety wasn’t present. Call him cruel, but the side’s sometimes overbearing nature got on his nerves at times.  
In contrast, he now realized that Thomas without the side was far worse than Thomas with a bit too much anxiety. Goddamn, did Logan doubt how much Anxiety’s mere presence over Thomas kept the man and, by extension, his more… energetic sides in check. Logan could barely handle Patton and Roman on a day-to-day basis, and they were so much worse right now.  
With Thomas scatter-brained, all of the sides were, in a way, affected.  
Hell, he would admit that he was a bit scatter-brained at the moment. That said a lot about the severity of the situation.  
…  
Fuck.  
Logan never thought he’d be saying such a thing, but they needed Anxiety back.

Despite what he’d done, Anxiety yearned to come back.

The visit to Anxiety’s room had helped Logan realize a variety of points he was surprised he hadn’t thought of and humored before.  
Firstly, Anxiety’s tendency to lash out against the other sides in moments of high emotion, namely arguments and debates between the four, was perfectly understandable.  
This was a thought he had humored before, hypothesizing that it merely served as a defense mechanism to the side, and he was a lot more correct than he honestly expected.  
Due to being in the side’s personal corner of the Mindscape, Logan had only been in a similar, and likely lessened, state of anxiety for a matter of a couple of minutes and he had felt horrible. The tightness in his chest and the racing of his thoughts only seemed to increase with every second, to the point that it was nearly unbearable by the end of the experience.  
He could only imagine how much it must hurt the anxious side to be in an even more heightened state of panic constantly, a state that likely only got worse during the arguments the others pulled him into.  
Logan was tempted to reach out to him and offer Anxiety a safe place and a noncommital opportunity to talk out his thoughts. As Logic, fallacious thoughts and cognitive distortions were some of what he was best at helping to dispel, both of which Anxiety seemed to struggle with from Logan’s observations.  
It probably wouldn’t be welcomed, however, so Logan would have to wait. Wait and evaluate.  
Anxiety’s typical modus operandi.  
Logan chuckled at the thought.

That was all Anxiety wanted someone to do right about now, but the sides still hated him, didn’t they? He couldn’t go asking them for help with his idiotic, irrational problems.  
He could handle it.  
He had to.

Secondly, having too much or too little of a side’s influence fucked Thomas up much more than Logan thought, to be blunt.  
All of the sides would have to sit down sometime in the future and clear the air, make sure they understood boundaries and how far they could push their host. No one side could have too much or too little sway on Thomas. Simple as that.  
Logan thought Anxiety having a bit too harsh of a grip on Thomas was horrible, but him letting go? So much worse.

Anxiety never meant to make things worse. He thought ducking out would be so much easier and would have fewer consequences on him, the other sides, and Thomas.  
To be honest, he thought it would just be death.

Thirdly, despite what the sides seemed to think before, Anxiety was not bad for Thomas. Quite the opposite, in all honesty.  
Instead, he served as, to put it into simple terms, a buffer against the world and all that inhabited it.  
Fight-or-flight was an ancient reflex, still left in humans from the times when a split second meant life or death. Anxiety was the embodiment of that age-old reflex.  
That was, Logan now realized, where the contrast of Logic and Anxiety stemmed from. That was why Logan saw so many similarities between himself and Anxiety, specifically in decision-making and how they evaluated situations; the sides, in a way, stemmed from nearly adjacent concepts, built on in different ways.  
Logic is built to take in the stimuli of our ever-changing modern world and respond to it logically, constantly evolving alongside human innovation. Meanwhile, Anxiety is still thinking in about the same way it did at the dawn of time; it takes in stimuli in a way that considers anything and everything a possible threat and thinks through every “what-if” possible.  
Both take in and respond to stimuli, they were just built to take in different stimuli at different times.  
To put it simply, Anxiety was, similarly to the other sides, a built-in defense mechanism against the world. Probably more so than any other side.

Anxiety was a built-in defense mechanism against the world, but, unaware to him, his temporary blindness was a built-in defense mechanism against himself.  
By taking away one of the side’s senses, that was one less sense to be overwhelmed with and, by extension, less panic.  
At least, that was the Mindscape’s logic.  
Not everyone agreed with it.

After everything had passed, after pulling them out of his room and, for lack of a better explanation, saving Thomas’s sanity, Anxiety opened up.  
Virgil told them his name.  
Logan realized Anxiety never meant to be a villain.  
He’d always been their protector, it just took a bit for everyone else to figure it out.

Virgil could protect them from everything, but he couldn’t protect himself from his own punishment.

Virgil fit in well in the “light side” of the Mindscape, Logan would say.  
It was a couple of weeks after Virgil’s acceptance and Logan sat at the kitchen table, arriving early to dinner after helping Patton set the table. The moral side was standing in the kitchen, preparing the last little bit of food, and the other two had yet to show. Roman’s arrival time was unpredictable, but Virgil was bound to be downstairs in a matter of minutes. He typically arrived at… Logan checked his watch, doing a small bit of calculation in his head. 6:05, if he was correct in a couple of assumptions. Five minutes before Patton typically sat down himself, with Logan and Roman arriving sometime between two to three minutes after.  
The sides were creatures of habit, needless to say.  
Today, Logan decided to “mix it up,” so to say. He had already been in the kitchen, anyway. So he now sat patiently at the table, smiling silently as Patton sang gently to the music playing in the kitchen as he cooked.  
It was domestic, in a way. Logan couldn’t say he minded.  
A series of light, calculated thuds down the stairs made it evident that Virgil was making his arrival. The anxious side rounded the corner, and Logan was about to greet him, before noticing he had his head downturned and hood up. Logan didn’t want to startle him, so he’d let the other man settle down before making his presence known.  
But what happened next intrigued him enough that he was more inclined to wait.  
Virgil came up behind his typical seat, making sure to firmly plant his palms against the top. He began to slowly pull the chair back, counting hoarsely and near-silently under his breath as he did so. After pulling the chair out a good deal, he moved to stand in front of it. He reached backward, estimating the location of the chair before sitting and pulling it towards the table in one swift motion. The anxious side then turned to the table, reaching forwards and brushing his palms over the cutlery and dishes in front of him. He turned over his shoulder, yelling “What’s for dinner?” into the kitchen where Patton still stood.  
“I made pasta! Breadsticks will be done in a second, kiddo.”  
A smile spread across Virgil’s face, an expression he wouldn’t have been caught dead with a mere month ago. Logan felt pride swell in his heart.  
He was finally getting used to them.

But in the anxious side’s mind, no one was there to see it.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to check me out on Tumblr (perplexed-kale) and Instagram (perplexed_kale) for more. Thank you!


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